Best 38 quotes in «revision quotes» category

Half my life is an act of revision.

Half my life is an act of revision; more than half the act is performed with small changes.

I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.

I can’t write five words but that I change seven.

Science reserves the highest reward for those of you who disprove our most cherished beliefs. At any moment someone from any walk of life could come forward and be responsible for a complete revision of our view of everything.

I'm perfectly proud of the work I did, looking back at it. I know I've had a bit of a revision since my 'Big Finish' stories came out.

In revision, your imagination becomes deeply engaged with your material. It's when you come to know your characters and begin to perceive their motivations and values.

In the wake of her indispensable textbook, Janet Burroway now offers a splendid and concise guide to the thorny task of revision. Writers, young and old, will feel encouraged and enlightened by this excellent DVD which offers a wonderful range of specific advice and suggestive comments from a group of experienced and thoughtful writers.

I reserve the right to evolve. What I think and feel today is subject to revision tomorrow.

I write a lot in my head. The revision goes on internally. It's not spontaneous and it doesn't have a schedule.

Revision is not the end of the creative process, but a new beginning. It's a chance not just to clean up and edit, but to open up and discover. The energetic prose comes about from all the energy that went into crafting it, I suppose.

Schools of science and physics replacing each other at a faster and faster rate. Just the nature of our world is constant revision, constant...negation of previous beliefs, and so...the whole world is a twist ending. Every week is a twist ending.

In a poem, the words happen; they just come. I let them. Otherwise, I wouldn't write. To interfere with what is happening is to distort the poem. Just a very small degree of intelligence and supervision is necessary. Very tactful. Any revision later that violates the text as it came, that begins rewriting the words, is fake.

I place a lot of emphasis on process and revision because I believe that all of my students can become better writers through hard work.

Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.

Stories, as much as we like to talk about them, retrospectively, as emanations of theme or worldview or intention, occur primarily as technical objects when they're being written. Or at least they do for me. They're the result of thousands of decisions made at speed during revision.

The common workshop goal is revision, not suicide.

The public must retain control of the great waterways. It is essential that any permit to obstruct them for reasons and on conditions that seem good at the moment should be subject to revision when changed conditions demand.

The contents of a house can trigger all sorts of revisions to family history.

The psyche of the individual is commensurate with the totality of creative energy. This requires a most radical revision of Western psychology.

There are days when the result is so bad that no fewer than five revisions are required. In contrast, when I'm greatly inspired, only four revisions are needed.

Allen Ginsberg instructs: "First thought, best thought." Oh, to have my every spontaneous thought count as poetry! No draft after draft like a draft horse. Clayton Eshleman, laughing, said, "'First thought best thought' is not 'First word best word ' Ginsberg does rewrite. I'm sure he does.

Words and sentences are subjects of revision; paragraphs and whole compositions are subjects of prevision.

Youth is the season of receptivity, and should be devoted to acquirement; and manhood of power--that demands an earnest application. Old age is for revision.

Writing well is more than mechanics, but it is not less.

An editor doesn't just read, he reads well, and reading well is a creative, powerful act. The ancients knew this and it frightened them. Mesopotamian society, for instance, did not want great reading from its scribes, only great writing. Scribes had to submit to a curious ruse: they had to downplay their reading skills lest they antagonize their employer. The Attic poet Menander wrote: "those who can read see twice as well." Ancient autocrats did not want their subjects to see that well. Order relied on obedience, not knowledge and reflection. So even though he was paid to read as much as write messages, the scribe's title cautiously referred to writing alone (scribere = "to write"); and the symbol for Nisaba, the Mesopotamian goddess of scribes, was not a tablet but a stylus. In his excellent book A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel writes, "It was safer for a scribe to be seen not as one who interpreted information, but who merely recorded it for the public good." In their fear of readers, ancients understood something we have forgotten about the magnitude of readership. Reading breeds the power of an independent mind. When we read well, we are thinking hard for ourselves—this is the essence of freedom. It is also the essence of editing. Editors are scribes liberated to not simply record and disseminate information, but think hard about it, interpret, and ultimately, influence it.

From the photo albums, every single print of her had been peeled away. Shots of the both of us together had been cut, the parts with her neatly trimmed away, leaving my image behind. Photos of me alone or of mountains and rivers and deer and cats were left intact. Three albums rendered into a revised past. It was as if I'd been alone at birth, alone all my days, and would continue alone.

I am hard at work on the second draft ... Second draft is really a misnomer as there are a gazillion revisions, large and small, that go into the writing of a book.

I think the hard work of writing is just how long a book is terrible before it's good.

Nothing is ever so good that it can’t stand a little revision, and nothing is ever so impossible and broken down that a try at fixing it is out of the question.

SAINT, n. A dead sinner revised and edited.

It was badly received by the generation to which it was first addressed, and the outpouring of angry nonsense to which it gave rise is sad to think upon. But the present generation will probably behave just as badly if another Darwin should arise, and inflict upon them that which the generality of mankind most hate—the necessity of revising their convictions. Let them, then, be charitable to us ancients; and if they behave no better than the men of my day to some new benefactor, let them recollect that, after all, our wrath did not come to much, and vented itself chiefly in the bad language of sanctimonious scolds. Let them as speedily perform a strategic right-about-face, and follow the truth wherever it leads.

There is a saying: Genius is perseverance. While genius does not consist entirely of editing, without editing it's pretty useless.

The writer must have a good imagination to begin with, but the imagination has to be muscular, which means it must be exercised in a disciplined way, day in and day out, by writing, failing, succeeding and revising." [The Writer's Digest Interview: Stephen King & Jerry B. Jenkins (Jessica Strawser, Writer's Digest, May/June 2009)]

According to one study by the United States Geological survey, 86 percent of oil reserves in the United States are the result not of what is estimated at the time of discovery but of the revisions and additions that come with further development.

After Ive sent my revised draft to my agent and editor, they suggest more improvement sand again, this revision phase can take anywhere from a few hours to a few months.

Every success story is a tale of constant adaption, revision and change.

A novel which has been too much worked over often goes flat, and no amount of laborious revision can take the place of careful planning beforehand.